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Essay On Language And Identity

878 Words4 Pages

Who are we? What forms one's identity? Language is a important element of culture and culture is known to be crucial definer of one's identity. Language connects people to a certain identity and allows them to communicate their ideas and values to themselves and the world... In other words language is important as it allows people to express their thoughts as well as beliefs. Language does not necessarily define one's identity and identity does not define language, however it does affect it. Depending on how many languages people know, they are able to decide on what language they want to use in order to communicate with other communities according to their identities.One's identity defines and regulates the use of language and not the contrary. …show more content…

Seeing as language is a way of one expressing itself we can connect language to identity. As in order for one to demonstrate itself we have to be able to express our feelings and emotions and we do so through communication. Some characteristics of language is that it's dynamic, meaning that it changes constantly for example, the English people speak now is not the same English that people used to speak hundreds of years before. Language changes and modernizes itself in order to evolve and has many variations through dialects. Different language communities have certain ways of talking that will set them apart from others and those differences are known as dialects. Dialects are not just accents but also grammar, vocabulary, syntax and common expressions used.One is able to identify and distinguish between different people, different ethnicities and races as people speak different languages. Each human belongs to a community which makes them speak a specific language and dialect that represent their community and differentiates them from others. Language connects people to their community as they are connected to people that speak the same

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Throughout generations cultural traditions have been passed down, alongside these traditions came language. The language of ancestors, which soon began to be molded by the tongue of newer generations, was inherited. Though language is an everlasting changing part of the world, it is a representation of one’s identity, not only in a cultural way but from an environmental standpoint as well. One’s identity is revealed through language from an environmental point of view because the world that one is surrounded with can cause them to have their own definitions of words, an accent, etc. With newer generations, comes newer forms of languages.

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This novel reveals that culture and language has a lot to do with forming one's identity. The type of culture and language a person has been surrounded with affects their sense of identity,

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Language is used to convey a message as well as connect people to a particular culture or ethnicity he or she identifies with. People who share the same language share a bond and pass their history through language. In chapter one of The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom Joanne Kilgour Dowdy speak about growing up in Trinidad and her mother insisting on her speaking in the colonizer's language rather than her native Trinidadian language. Joanne Kilgour Dowdy felt as if her identity was being pushed to the side when she was forced to speak “Colonized English” when she was at school or around the social elite of her community, and felt ridiculed from her peers for speaking proper as if she was white or of the elite social class. Dowdy major concern was how to have the freedom to go back and forth from home, language to the public language without feeling judged from both sides of her

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I agree with James Baldwin when he says that language is the key to identity and social acceptance. Depending on what language you speak and in what dialect you speak it, people can either accept you or not and they can see your identity. Suppose you are a person who comes to America from a country like Saudi Arabia. When you come you speak little English so you use Arabic to talk with your family. If someone overheard you speaking in Arabic they would most likely get scared of you and people would start to avoid you.

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Identity is a distinctive identifier of who we are as individuals. People must learn how to construct their own identities through the actions and choices they make. Sometimes when people are influenced by society or the world around them, their own sense of identity can become unfavorably distorted. As such, it is important for people to stay loyal to themselves in order to cultivate and maintain that strong sense of identity.

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The consideration of language as a concrete entity places ownership upon the individuals that had spoken the language originally. This reasoning can be dangerous in creating a mindset that reserves the right for certain humans to possess a language, whereas others may not be permitted to own or speak it. As a result, an exclusive boundary can create tension between parties over ownership of the language. Although language may be considered as a shared entity among humans, I think that the possession of language does not lie solely with the native speakers of that particular language. There are many ways that different languages have evolved into a variety of

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Throughout the world there are many different cultures and just one aspect that gives culture its uniqueness is the dialect or language. Language is composed of many different symbols that everyone in a given culture understands, they have a universal meaning. Just because one culture has a symbol for understanding something, doesn 't mean that another culture will share that same meaning. Language for many cultures is what generated that culture, and what made it distinctly different from the others around it. Language can be in a form of art, music, or simply dialect.

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